samedi, 25 mai 2019

Algorithmic Governance and Political Legitimacy

In ever more areas of life, algorithms are coming to substitute for judgment exercised by identifiable human beings who can be held to account. The rationale offered is that automated decision-making will be more reliable. But a further attraction is that it serves to insulate various forms of power from popular pressures.

Our readiness to acquiesce in the conceit of authorless control is surely due in part to our ideal of procedural fairness, which de­mands that individual discretion exercised by those in power should be replaced with rules whenever possible, because authority will inevitably be abused. This is the original core of liberalism, dating from the English Revolution.

Mechanized judgment resembles liberal proceduralism. It relies on our habit of deference to rules, and our suspicion of visible, personified authority. But its effect is to erode precisely those pro­cedural liberties that are the great accomplishment of the liberal tradition, and to place authority beyond scrutiny. I mean “authori­ty” in the broadest sense, including our interactions with outsized commercial entities that play a quasi-governmental role in our lives. That is the first problem. A second problem is that decisions made by algorithm are often not explainable, even by those who wrote the algorithm, and for that reason cannot win rational assent. This is the more fundamental problem posed by mechanized decision-making, as it touches on the basis of political legitimacy in any liberal regime.

I hope that what follows can help explain why so many people feel angry, put-upon, and powerless. And why so many, in expressing their anger, refer to something called “the establishment,” that shadowy and pervasive entity. In this essay I will be critiquing both algorithmic governance and (more controversially) the tenets of pro­gressive governance that make these digital innovations attractive to managers, bureaucrats, and visionaries. What is at stake is the qual­itative character of institutional authority—how we experience it.

In The Black Box Society: The Hidden Algorithms That Control Money and Information, University of Maryland law professor Frank Pasquale elaborates in great detail what others have called “platform capitalism,” emphasizing its one-way mirror quality. In­creasingly, every aspect of our lives—our movements through space, our patterns of consumption, our affiliations, our intellectual habits and political leanings, our linguistic patterns, our susceptibility to various kinds of pitches, our readiness to cave in minor disputes, our sexual predilections and ready inferences about the state of our marriage—are laid bare as data to be collected by companies who, for their own part, guard with military-grade secrecy the algorithms by which they use this information to determine our standing in the reputational economy. The classic stories that have been with us for decades, of someone trying to correct an error made by one of the credit rating agencies and finding that the process is utterly opaque and the agencies unaccountable, give us some indication of the kind of world that is being constructed for us.

What Was Self-Government?

“Children in their games are wont to submit to rules which they have themselves established, and to punish misdemeanors which they have themselves defined.” Thus did Tocqueville marvel at Americans’ habit of self-government, and the temperament it both required and encouraged from a young age. “The same spirit,” he said, “pervades every act of social life.”

Writing recently in the Atlantic, Yoni Appelbaum notes the sheer bulk of voluntary associations that once took up the hours and days of Americans, from labor unions and trade associations to mutual insurers, fraternal organizations, and volunteer fire departments. Many of these “mirrored the federal government in form: Local chapters elected representatives to state-level gatherings, which sent delegates to national assemblies. . . . Executive officers were accountable to legislative assemblies; independent judiciaries ensured that both complied with rules.” Toward the end of the twentieth centu­ry, however, this way of life more or less collapsed, as Robert Put­nam documented in Bowling Alone. We still have voluntary associa­tions, but they are now typically run by salaried professionals, not the members themselves, Appelbaum points out. This is part of the broader shift toward what has been called “managerialism.”

I believe these developments have prepared us to accept a further abstraction of institutional decision-making—as something having little to do with ourselves, and with human judgment as we know it firsthand. Another development that paved the way for our accept­ance of algorithmic governance was the transfer of power out of rep­resentative bodies into administrative agencies. Let us take a glance at this before turning to things digital.

Administration versus Politics

We often hear about a growing “administrative state” (usually from conservative commentators) and are given to understand that it is something we ought to worry about. But why? Doesn’t it consist simply of the stuff all those agencies of the government must do in order to discharge their duties? And speaking of government agen­cies, what are they—part of the executive branch? Yes they are, but a bit of confusion is natural, as this is a hazy area of governance.

In The Administrative Threat, Columbia law professor Philip Ham­burger writes that, in contrast to executive power proper, “ad­ministrative power involves not just force but legal obligation.” This is an important distinction, and in the blurring of it lies great mis­chief against the Constitution, which invested “the power to bind—that is, to create legal obligation” not in the executive branch but in Congress and in the courts. Administrative power “thereby side­steps most of the Constitution’s procedural freedoms.” It is funda­mentally an “evasion of governance through law.”

Provocatively, Hamburger draws a close parallel with the mecha­nisms of prerogative (such as the notorious Star Chamber) by which King James I of England consolidated “absolute” power—not in­finite power, but power exercised through extralegal means:

Ever tempted to exert more power with less effort, rulers are rarely content to govern merely through the law, and in their restless desire to escape its pathways, many of them try to work through other mechanisms. These other modes of bind­ing subjects are modes of abso­lute power, and once one understands this, it is not altogether surprising that absolute power is a recurring problem and that American administrative power revives it.

The “less effort” bit is just as important for understanding this formula as the “more power” bit. The relevant effort is that of per­suading others, the stuff of democratic politics. The “restless desire to escape” the inconvenience of law is one that progressives are especially prone to, in their aspiration to transform society: merely extant majorities of opinion, and the legislative possibilities that are circumscribed by them, typically inspire not deference but impatience. Conservatives have their own vanguardist enthusiasms that rely on centralized and largely unaccountable power, but in their case this power is generally not located in executive agencies.1

I am not competent to say if Hamburger is right in his characterization of administrative power as extralegal (Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule says no), but in any case he raises ques­tions that are within the realm of conventional political dispute and within the competence of constitutional scholars to grapple with. By contrast, the rush to install forms of extralegal power not in execu­tive agencies, but in the algorithms that increasingly govern wide swaths of life, pushes the issue of political legitimacy into entirely new territory.

More Power with Less Effort

“Technology” is a slippery term. We don’t use it to name a toothbrush or a screwdriver, or even things like capacitors and diodes. Rather, use of the word usually indicates that a speaker is referring to a tool or an underlying operation that he does not understand (or does not wish to explain). Essentially, we use it to mean “magic.” In this obscurity lies great opportunity to “exert more power with less effort,” to use Hamburger’s formula.

To grasp the affinities between administrative governance and algorithmic governance, one must first get over that intellectually debilitating article of libertarian faith, namely that “the government” poses the only real threat to liberty. For what does Silicon Valley represent, if not a locus of quasi-governmental power untouched by either the democratic process or by those hard-won procedural liberties that are meant to secure us against abuses by the (actual, elected) government? If the governmental quality of rule by algo­rithms remains obscure to us, that is because we actively welcome it into our own lives under the rubric of convenience, the myth of free services, and ersatz forms of human connection—the new opiates of the masses.

To characterize this as the operation of “the free market” (as its spokespersons do) requires a display of intellectual agility that might be admirable if otherwise employed. The reality is that what has emerged is a new form of monopoly power made possible by the “network effect” of those platforms through which everyone must pass to conduct the business of life. These firms sit at informational bottlenecks, collecting data and then renting it out, whether for the purpose of targeted ads or for modeling the electoral success of a political platform. Mark Zuckerberg has said frankly that “In a lot of ways Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company. . . . We have this large community of people, and more than other technology companies we’re really setting policies.”

It was early innovations that allowed the platform firms to take up their positions. But it is this positioning, and control of the data it allows them to gather, that accounts for the unprecedented rents they are able to collect. If those profits measure anything at all, it is the reach of a metastasizing grid of surveillance and social control. As Pasquale emphasizes, it is this grid’s basic lack of intelligibility that renders it politically unaccountable. Yet political accountability is the very essence of representative government. Whatever this new form of governance might be called, it is certainly not that.

Explainability and Legitimacy

This intelligibility deficit cannot be overcome simply through goodwill, as the logic by which an algorithm reaches its conclusions is usually opaque even to those who wrote the algorithm, due to its sheer complexity. In “machine learning,” an array of variables are fed into deeply layered “neural nets” that simulate the fire/don’t fire synaptic connections of an animal brain. Vast amounts of data are used in a massively iterated (and, in some versions, unsupervised) training regimen. Because the strength of connections between logi­cal nodes within layers and between layers is highly plastic, just like neural pathways, the machine gets trained by trial and error and is able to arrive at something resembling knowledge of the world. That is, it forms associations that correspond to regularities in the world.

As with humans, these correspondences are imperfect. The differ­ence is that human beings are able to give an account of their reason­ing. Now, we need to be careful here. Our cognition emerges from lower-level biological processes that are utterly inaccessible to us. Further, human beings confabulate, reach for rationalizations that obscure more than they reveal, are subject to self-deception, etc. All this we know. But giving an account is an indispensable element of democratic politics. Further, it is not only legislative bodies that observe this scruple.

When a court issues a decision, the judge writes an opinion, typically running to many pages, in which he explains his reasoning. He grounds the decision in law, precedent, common sense, and prin­ciples that he feels obliged to articulate and defend. This is what transforms the decision from mere fiat into something that is polit­ically legitimate, capable of securing the assent of a free people. It constitutes the difference between simple power and authority. One distinguishing feature of a modern, liberal society is that authority is supposed to have this rational quality to it—rather than appealing to, say, a special talent for priestly divination. This is our Enlightenment inheritance.

You see the problem, then. Institutional power that fails to secure its own legitimacy becomes untenable. If that legitimacy cannot be grounded in our shared rationality, based on reasons that can be articulated, interrogated, and defended, it will surely be claimed on some other basis. What this will be is already coming into view, and it bears a striking resemblance to priestly divination: the inscrutable arcana of data science, by which a new clerisy peers into a hidden layer of reality that is revealed only by a self-taught AI program—the logic of which is beyond human knowing.

For the past several years it has been common to hear establishmentarian intellectuals lament “populism” as a rejection of Enlightenment ideals. But we could just as well say that populism is a re-assertion of democracy, and of the Enlightenment principles that underlie it, against priestly authority. Our politics have become at bottom an epistemic quarrel, and it is not all clear to me that the well‑capitalized, institutional voices in this quarrel have the firmer ground to stand on in claiming the mantle of legitimacy—if we want to continue to insist that legitimacy rests on reasonableness and argument.

Alternatively, we may accept technocratic competence as a legiti­mate claim to rule, even if it is inscrutable. But then we are in a position of trust.2 This would be to move away from the originating insight of liberalism: power corrupts. Such a move toward trust seems unlikely, however, given that people are waking up to the business logic that often stands behind the promise of technocratic competence and good will.

Surveillance Capitalism

In her landmark 2019 book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff parses what is really a new form of political economy, bearing little resemblance to capitalism as we have known it. The cynic’s dictum for explaining internet economics—“if you don’t know what the product is, you’re the product”—turns out to be incorrect. What we are, Zuboff shows, is a source of raw material that she calls “behavioral surplus.” Our behavior becomes the basis for a product—predictions about our future behavior—which are then offered on a behavioral futures market. The customers of the platform firms are those who purchase these prediction products, as a means to influence our behavior. The more you know of some-one’s predilections, the more highly elaborated, fine-grained, and successful your efforts to manipulate him will be. The raw material on which the whole apparatus runs is knowledge acquired through surveillance. Competition for behavioral surplus is such that this surveillance must reach ever deeper, and bring every hidden place into the light.

At this point, it becomes instructive to bring in a theory of the state, and see if it can illuminate what is going on. For this purpose, James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State, published in 1998, is useful. He traces the development of the modern state as a process of rendering the lives of its inhabitants more “legible.” The premodern state was in many respects blind; it “knew precious little about its subjects, their wealth, their landholdings and yields, their location, their very identity. It lacked anything like a detailed ‘map’ of its terrain and its people.” This lack of a synoptic view put real limits on the aspiration for centralized control; the state’s “interventions were often crude and self-defeating.” And contrariwise, the rise of a more synoptic administrative apparatus made possible various utopian schemes for the wholesale remaking of society.

Google is taking its project for legibility to the streets, quite literally, in its project to build a model city within Toronto in which everything will be surveilled. Sensors will be embedded throughout the physical plant to capture the resident’s activities, then to be mas­saged by cutting-edge data science. The hope, clearly, is to build a deep, proprietary social science. Such a science could lead to real improvements in urban planning, for example, by being able to pre­dict demand for heat and electricity, manage the allocation of traffic capacity, and automate waste disposal. But note that intellectual property rights over the data collected are key to the whole concept; without them there is no business rationale. With those rights secure, “smart cities” are the next trillion-dollar frontier for big tech.

Writing in Tablet, Jacob Siegel points out that “democratic gov­ernments think they can hire out for the basic service they’re sup­posed to provide, effectively subcontracting the day to day functions of running a city and providing municipal services. Well, they’re right, they can, but of course they’ll be advertising why they’re not really necessary and in the long run putting themselves out of a job.” There is real attraction to having the optimizers of Silicon Valley take things over, given the frequent dysfunction of democratic gov­ernment. Quite reasonably, many of us would be willing to give up “some democracy for a bit of benign authoritarianism, if it only made the damn trains run on time. The tradeoff comes in the loss of power over the institutions we have to live inside.” The issue, then, is sovereignty.3

As Scott points out in Seeing Like a State, the models of society that can be constructed out of data, however synoptic, are necessarily radical simplifications. There is no quantitative model that can capture the multivalent richness of neighborhood life as described by Jane Jacobs, for ex­ample, in her classic urban ethnography of New York. The mischief of grand schemes for progress lies in the fact that, even in the absence of totalitarian aspirations, the logic of metrics and rationalization carries with it an imperative to remake the world, in such a way as to make its thin, formal descriptions true. The gap between the model and reality has to be narrowed. This effort may need to reach quite deep, beyond the arrangement of infrastructure to touch on considerations of political anthropology. The model demands, and helps bring into being, a certain kind of subject. And sure enough, in our nascent era of Big Data social engineering, we see a craze for self-quantification, the voluntary pursuit of a kind of self-legibility that is expressed in the same idiom as technocratic so­cial control and demands the same sort of thin, schematic self-objectifications.4

If we take a long historical view, we have to concede that a regime can be viewed by its citizens as legitimate without being based on democratic representation. Europe’s absolutist monarchies of the sev­enteenth century managed it, for a spell. The regime that is being imagined for us now by venture capital would not be democratic. But it emphatically would be “woke,” if we can extrapolate from the current constellation of forces.

And this brings us to the issue of political correctness. It is a topic we are all fatigued with, I know. But I suggest we try to understand the rise of algorithmic governance in tandem with the rise of woke capital, as there appears to be some symbiotic affinity between them. The least one can say is that, taken together, they provide a good diagnostic lens that can help bring into focus the authoritarian turn of American society, and the increasingly shaky claim of our institu­tions to democratic legitimacy.

The Bureaucratic Logic of Political Correctness

One reason why algorithms have become attractive to elites is that they can be used to install the automated enforcement of cut­ting‑edge social norms. In the last few months there have been some news items along these lines: Zuckerberg assured Congress that Facebook is developing AI that will detect and delete what progressives like to call “hate speech.” You don’t have to be a free speech absolutist to recognize how tendentiously that label often gets ap­plied, and be concerned accordingly. The New York Times ran a story about new software being pitched in Hollywood that will determine if a script has “equitable gender roles.” The author of a forthcoming French book on artificial intelligence, herself an AI researcher, told me that she got a pitch recently from a start-up “whose aim was ‘to report workplace harassment and discrimination without talking to a human.’ They claim to be able to ‘use scientific memory and interview techniques to capture secure records of high­ly emotional events.’”

Presumably a scientifically “secure record” here means a description of some emotionally charged event that is shorn of ambiguity, and thereby tailored to the need of the system for clean inputs. A schematic description of inherently messy experience saves us the difficult, humanizing effort of interpretation and introspection, so we may be relieved to take up the flattened understanding that is offered us by the legibility-mongers.5

Locating the authority of evolving social norms in a computer will serve to provide a sheen of objectivity, such that any reluctance to embrace newly announced norms appears, not as dissent, but as something irrational—as a psychological defect that requires some kind of therapeutic intervention. So the effect will be to gather yet more power to what Michel Foucault called “the minor civil servants of moral orthopedics.” (Note that Harvard University has over fifty Title IX administrators on staff.) And there will be no satisfying this beast, because it isn’t in fact “social norms” that will be enforced (that term suggests something settled and agreed-upon); rather it will be a state of permanent revolution in social norms. Whatever else it is, wokeness is a competitive status game played in the institutions that serve as gatekeepers of the meritocracy. The flanking maneuvers of institutional actors against one another, and the competition among victim groups for relative standing on the intersectional to­tem pole, make the bounds of acceptable opinion highly unstable. This very unsettledness, quite apart from the specific content of the norm of the month, makes for pliable subjects of power: one is not allowed to develop confidence in the rightness of one’s own judg­ments.

To be always off-balance in this way is to be more administratable. A world-renowned historian, a real intellectual giant of the “old Left,” told me that once a year he is required to take an online, multiple-choice test administered by his university’s HR department, which looks for the proper responses to various office situations. It seems clear that there is a symbiotic relationship between administration and political correctness, yet it is difficult to say which is the senior partner in the alliance. The bloated and ever-growing layer of administrators—the deans of inclusion, providers of workshops for student orientation, diversity officers, and what­not—feeds on conflict, using episodes of trouble to start new initia­tives.

But what does any of this have to do with the appeal of algorithms to managers and administrators? If we follow through on the suspicion that, in its black-box quality, “technology” is simply administration by other means, a few observations can be made.

First, in the spirit of Václav Havel we might entertain the idea that the institutional workings of political correctness need to be shrouded in peremptory and opaque administrative mechanisms be­cause its power lies precisely in the gap between what people actu­ally think and what one is expected to say. It is in this gap that one has the experience of humiliation, of staying silent, and that is how power is exercised.

But if we put it this way, what we are really saying is not that PC needs administrative enforcement but rather the reverse: the expand­ing empire of bureaucrats needs PC. The conflicts created by identi­ty politics become occasions to extend administrative authority into previously autonomous domains of activity. This would be to take a more Marxian line, treating PC as “superstructure” that serves main­ly to grease the wheels for the interests of a distinct class—not of capitalists, but of managers.6

The incentive to technologize the whole drama enters thus: managers are answerable (sometimes legally) for the conflict that they also feed on. In a corporate setting, especially, some kind of ass‑covering becomes necessary. Judgments made by an algorithm (ideally one supplied by a third-party vendor) are ones that nobody has to take responsibility for. The more contentious the social and political landscape, the bigger the institutional taste for automated decision-making is likely to be.

Political correctness is a regime of institutionalized insecurity, both moral and material. Seemingly solid careers are subject to sud­den reversal, along with one’s status as a decent person. Contrast such a feeling of being precarious with the educative effect of volun­tary associations and collaborative rule-making, as marveled at by Tocqueville. Americans’ practice of self-government once gave rise to a legitimate pride—the pride of being a grown-up in a free society. One thing it means to be a grown-up is that you are willing to subordinate your own interests to the common good at crucial junctures. The embrace of artificial intelligence by institutions, as a way of managing social conflict, is likely to further erode that adult spirit of self-government, and contribute to the festering sense that our institutions are illegitimate.

The Ultimate Nudge

Of all the platform firms, Google is singular. Its near-monopoly on search (around 90 percent) puts it in a position to steer thought. And increasingly, it avows the steering of thought as its unique responsibility. Famously founded on the principle “Don’t be evil” (a sort of libertarian moral minimalism), it has since taken up the mission of actively doing good, according to its own lights.

In an important article titled “Google.gov,” law professor Adam J. White details both the personnel flows and deep intellectual affini­ties between Google and the Obama White House. Hundreds of people switched jobs back and forth between this one firm and the administration over eight years. It was a uniquely close relationship, based on a common ethos, that began with Obama’s visit to Goog­le’s headquarters in 2004 and deepened during his presidential cam­paign in 2007. White writes:

Both view society’s challenges today as social-engineering problems, whose resolutions depend mainly on facts and ob­jective reasoning. Both view information as being at once ruth­lessly value-free and yet, when properly grasped, a powerful force for ideological and social reform. And so both aspire to reshape Americans’ informational context, ensuring that we make choices based only upon what they consider the right kind of facts—while denying that there could be any values or politics embedded in the effort.

One of the central tenets of progressives’ self-understanding is that they are pro-fact and pro-science, while their opponents (often the majority) are said to have an unaccountable aversion to these good things: they cling to fond illusions and irrational anxieties. It follows that good governance means giving people informed choices. This is not the same as giving people what they think they want, according to their untutored preferences. Informed choices are the ones that make sense within a well-curated informational setting or context.

When I was a doctoral student in political theory at the University of Chicago in the 1990s, there was worry about a fissure opening up between liberalism and democracy. The hot career track for my cohort was to tackle this problem under the rubric of an intellectual oeuvre called “deliberative democracy.” It wasn’t my thing, but as near as I could tell, the idea (which was taken from the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas) was that if you could just establish the right framing conditions for deliberation, the demos would arrive at acceptably liberal positions. We should be able to formalize these conditions, it was thought. And conversely, wherever the opinions of the demos depart from an axis running roughly from the editorial page of the New York Times to that of the Wall Street Journal, it was taken to be prima facie evidence that there was some distorting influ­ence in the conditions under which people were conducting their thought processes, or their conversations among themselves. The result was opinion that was not authentically democratic (i.e., not liberal). These distortions too needed to be ferreted out and formal­ized. Then you would have yourself a proper theory.

Of course, the goal was not just to have a theory, but to get rid of the distortions. Less tendentiously: protecting the alliance “liberal democracy” required denying that it is an alliance, and propping it up as a conceptual unity. This would require a cadre of subtle dia­lecticians working at a meta-level on the formal conditions of thought, nudging the populace through a cognitive framing operation to be conducted beneath the threshold of explicit argument.

At the time, all this struck me as an exercise in self-delusion by aspiring apparatchiks for whom a frankly elitist posture would have been psychologically untenable. But the theory has proved immensely successful. By that I mean the basic assumptions and aspira­tions it expressed have been institutionalized in elite culture, perhaps nowhere more than at Google, in its capacity as directorate of information. The firm sees itself as “definer and defender of the public interest,” as White says.

One further bit of recent intellectual history is important for understanding the mental universe in which Google arose, and in which progressivism took on the character that it did during the Obama years. The last two decades saw the rise of new currents in the social sciences that emphasize the cognitive incompetence of human beings. The “rational actor” model of human behavior—a simplistic premise that had underwritten the party of the market for the previous half century—was deposed by the more psychologically informed school of behavioral economics, which teaches that we need all the help we can get in the form of external “nudges” and cognitive scaffolding if we are to do the rational thing. But the glee and sheer repetition with which this (needed) revision to our under­standing of the human person has been trumpeted by journalists and popularizers indicates that it has some moral appeal, quite apart from its intellectual merits. Perhaps it is the old Enlightenment thrill at disabusing human beings of their pretensions to specialness, whether as made in the image of God or as “the rational animal.” The effect of this anti-humanism is to make us more receptive to the work of the nudgers.

The whole problem of “liberal democracy”—that unstable hy­brid—is visible in microcosm at Google; it manifests as schizophrenia in how the founders characterize the firm’s mission. Their difficulty is understandable, as the trust people place in Google is based on its original mission of simply answering queries that reflect the extant priorities of a user, when in fact the mission has crept toward a more tutelary role in shaping thought.

Google achieved its dominance in search because of the superior salience of the results it returned compared to its late-1990s rivals. The mathematical insights of its founders played a large role in this. The other key to their success was that they rigorously excluded commercial considerations from influencing the search results. Reading accounts of the firm’s early days, one cannot help being struck by the sincere high-mindedness of the founders. The internet was something pure and beautiful, and would remain so only if guarded against the corrupting influence of advertising.

In other words, there was some truth in the founding myth of the company, namely, the claim that there are no human biases (whether value judgments or commercial interests) at work in the search results it presents to users. Everything is in the hands of neutral algorithms. The neutrality of these algorithms is something the rest of us have to take on trust, because they are secret (as indeed they need to be to protect their integrity against the cat-and-mouse game of “search engine optimization,” by which interested parties can manipulate their rank in the results).

Of course, from the very beginning, the algorithms in question have been written and are constantly adjusted by particular human beings, who assess the aptness of the results they generate according to their own standards of judgment. So the God’s-eye perspective, view-from-nowhere conceit is more ideal than reality. But that ideal plays a legitimating role that has grown in importance as the com­pany has become a commercial behemoth, and developed a powerful interest in steering users of its search engine toward its own ser­vices.7 More importantly, the ideal of neutral objectivity underlies Google’s self-understanding as definer and defender of the public interest.

This is the same conceit of epistemic/moral hauteur that Obama adopted as the lynchpin of his candidacy. The distinctive feature of this rhetoric is that the idea of neutrality or objectivity is deployed for a specific purpose: to assert an identity of interest between liberals and the demos. This identity reveals itself once distortions of objective reality are cleared away. Speaking at Google’s headquarters in 2007 (as characterized by White), Obama said that “as president he wouldn’t allow ‘special interests’ to dominate public discourse, for instance in debates about health care reform, because his administration would respond with ‘data and facts.’” During the Q&A, Obama offered the following:

You know, one of the things that you learn when you’re traveling and running for president is, the American people at their core are a decent people. There’s . . . common sense there, but it’s not tapped. And mainly people—they’re just misinformed, or they’re too busy, they’re trying to get their kids to school, they’re working, they just don’t have enough information, or they’re not professionals at sorting out the infor­mation that’s out there, and so our political process gets skewed. But if you give them good information, their instincts are good and they will make good decisions. And the president has the bully pulpit to give them good information.

. . . I am a big believer in reason and facts and evidence and feedback—everything that allows you to do what you do, that’s what we should be doing in our government. [Applause.]

I want people in technology, I want innovators and engi­neers and scientists like yourselves, I want you helping us make policy—based on facts! Based on reason!

Lest my point be misunderstood, it is perhaps appropriate to say that I voted for the man in 2008. And since the example he gives above is that of health care, I should say that I am open to the idea that socialized medicine is a good idea, in principle. Further, the debate about health care really was distorted by special interests. The point I wish to make is not about substantive policy positions, but rather to consider the cognitive style of progressive politics as exem­plified by the mutual infatuation of Google and Obama.

Why engage in such an effort now, in the Trump era, when we are faced with such a different set of problems? It is because I believe the appeal of Trump, to fully half the country, was due in significant part to reaction against this peremptory and condescending turn of progressivism.

It is telling that Obama said he would use the president’s bully pulpit not to persuade (the opportunity that “the bully pulpit” has generally been taken to offer), but to “give good information.” We are a people of sound instincts, but “not professionals at sorting out the information that’s out there.” What we need, then, is a professional.

Persuasion is what you try to do if you are engaged in politics. Curating information is what you do if you believe your outlook is one from which dissent can only be due to a failure to properly process the relevant information. This is an anti-political form of politics. If politics is essentially fighting (toward compromise or stalemate, if all goes well, but fighting nonetheless), technocratic rule is essentially helping, as in “the helping professions.” It extends compassion to human beings, based on an awareness of their cogni­tive limitations and their tendency to act out.

In the technocratic dream of early twentieth-century Progressives such as Woodrow Wilson, politics was to be overcome through facts and science, clearing the way for rule by experts. Daniel Bell famously named this hoped-for denouement “the end of ideology.” It was a project that acquired a moral mandate as recoil from the ideologically driven cataclysm of World War II. From today’s per­spective, it is striking that twentieth-century Progressives seemed not very conflicted about their cognitive elitism.8 Wilson’s project to transfer power from the legislature to administrative bodies entailed a deliberate transfer of power to “the knowledge class,” as Hamburger writes, or “those persons whose identity or sense of self-worth centers on their knowledge.” This includes “all who are more attached to the authority of knowledge than to the authority of local political communities. . . . [T]heir sense of affinity with cosmopolitan knowledge, rather than local connectedness, has been the foundation of their influence and their identity.”

Today’s progressives have a more complex relationship to their own elitism, surely due in part to the legacy of the civil rights move­ment.9 It takes a certain amount of narrative finesse to maintain a suitably democratic self-understanding while also affirming the role of expertise. This is the predicament of the tech firms, and it is the same one Obama had to manage for himself. In his 2007 remarks at Google, Obama referred to the firm’s origins in a college dorm room, and drew parallels with his own trajectory and aspirations. “What we shared is a belief in changing the world from the bottom up, not the top down; that a bunch of ordinary people can do extraordinary things.” This is the language of a former community organizer. But it is a peculiar sort of “bottom up” that is meant here.

In the Founders Letter that accompanied Google’s 2004 initial public offering, Larry Page and Sergey Brin said their goal is “getting you exactly what you want, even when you aren’t sure what you need.” The perfect search engine would do this “with almost no effort” on the part of the user. In a 2013 update to the Founders Letter, Page said that “the search engine of my dreams provides information without you even having to ask.” Adam J. White glosses these statements: “To say that the perfect search engine is one that mini­mizes the user’s effort is effectively to say that it minimizes the user’s active input. Google’s aim is to provide perfect search results for what users ‘truly’ want—even if the users themselves don’t yet realize what that is. Put another way, the ultimate aspiration is not to answer the user’s questions but the question Google believes she should have asked.” As Eric Schmidt told the Wall Street Journal, “[O]ne idea is that more and more searches are done on your behalf without you having to type. . . . I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”

The ideal being articulated in Mountain View is that we will inte­grate Google’s services into our lives so effortlessly, and the guiding presence of this beneficent entity in our lives will be so pervasive and unobtrusive, that the boundary between self and Google will blur. The firm will provide a kind of mental scaffold for us, guiding our intentions by shaping our informational context. This is to take the idea of trusteeship and install it in the infrastructure of thought.

Populism is the rejection of this.

The American founders were well acquainted with the pathetic trajectories of the ancient democracies, which reliably devolved into faction, oligarchic revolution, and tyranny. They designed our con­stitutional regime to mitigate the worst tendencies of direct democracy by filtering popular passions through political representation, and through nonrepresentative checks on popular will. The more you know of political history, the more impressive the American founding appears.10

Any would-be populist needs to keep this accomplishment in view, as a check on his own attraction to playing the tribune. How much deference is due the demos? I think the decisive question to ask is, what is the intellectual temper of today’s elites? Is it marked by the political sobriety of the founding generation, or an articulated vision of the common good of the nation such as the twentieth-century Progressives offered? Not so much? One can be wary of the demos and still prefer, like William F. Buckley, to be ruled by the first fifty names in the Boston phone book than by one’s fellow intellectuals.

When the internal culture at Google spills out into the headlines, we are offered a glimpse of the moral universe that stands behind the “objective” algorithms. Recall the Googlers’ reaction, which can only be called hysterical, to the internal memo by James Damore. He offered rival explanations, other than sexism, for the relative scarcity of women programmers at the firm (and in tech generally). The memo was written in the language of rational argumentation, and adduced plenty of facts, but the wrong kind. For this to occur within the firm was deeply threatening to its self-understanding as being at once a mere conduit for information and a force for pro­gress. Damore had to be quarantined in the most decisive manner possible. His dissent was viewed not as presenting arguments that must be met, but rather facts that must be morally disqualified.

On one hand, facilitating the free flow of information was Silicon Valley’s original ideal. But on the other hand, the control of information has become indispensable to prosecuting the forward march of history. This, in a nutshell, would seem to be the predicament that the platform firms of Silicon Valley find themselves in. The incoherence of their double mandate accounts for their stumbling, incoherent moves to suppress the kinds of speech that cultural progressives find threatening.11

This conflict is most acute in the United States, where the legal and political tradition protecting free speech is most robust. In Eu­rope, the alliance between social media companies and state actors to root out and punish whatever they deem “hate” (some of which others deem dissent) is currently being formalized. This has become especially urgent ahead of the European Parliament elections sched­uled for May 2019, which various EU figures have characterized as the last chance to quarantine the populist threat. Mounir Mahjoubi, France’s secretary of state for digital affairs, explained in February 2019 that, by the time of the election, “it will be possible to formally file a complaint online for hateful content.”12 In particular, Twitter and Facebook have agreed to immediately transmit the IP addresses of those denounced for such behavior to a special cell of the French police “so that the individual may be rapidly identified, rapidly prosecuted and sentenced.” He did not explain how “hateful con­tent” is to be defined, or who gets to do it. But it is reported that Facebook has a private army of fifteen to twenty thousand for this task.

Speaking at MIT six months after the Damore memo episode, in February 2018, former president Obama addressed head-on the problem of deliberative democracy in an internet culture. He made the familiar point about a “balkanization of our public conversation” and an attendant fragmenting of the nation, accelerated by the internet. “Essentially we now have entirely different realities that are being created, with not just different opinions but now different facts—different sources, different people who are considered author­itative.” As Obama noted, “it is very difficult to figure out how democracy works over the long term in those circumstances.” We need “a common baseline of facts and information.” He urged his tech audience to consider “what are the . . . algorithms, the mechanisms whereby we can create more of a common conversation.”

Obama’s description of the problem seems to me apt. Our political strife has become thoroughly epistemic in nature. But the fix he recommends—using algorithms to “create more of a common conversation”—is guaranteed to further inflame the sense any dissi­dent-minded person has that the information ecosystem is “rigged,” to use one of President Trump’s favorite words. If we are going to disqualify voices in a way that is not explainable, and instead de­mand trust in the priestly tenders of the algorithms, what we will get is a politics of anticlericalism, as in the French Revolution. That was not a happy time.

Among those ensconced in powerful institutions, the view seems to be that the breakdown of trust in establishment voices is caused by the proliferation of unauthorized voices on the internet. But the causal arrow surely goes the other way as well: our highly fragmented casting-about for alternative narratives that can make better sense of the world as we experience it is a response to the felt lack of fit between experience and what we are offered by the official organs, and a corollary lack of trust in them. For progressives to now seek to police discourse from behind an algorithm is to double down on the political epistemology that has gotten us to this point. The algorithm’s role is to preserve the appearance of liberal proceduralism, that austerely fair-minded ideal, the spirit of which is long dead.

Such a project reveals a lack of confidence in one’s arguments—or a conviction about the impotence of argument in politics, due to the irrationality of one’s opponents. In that case we have a simple contest for power, to be won and held onto by whatever means necessary.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume III, Number 2 (Summer 2019): 73–94.

Notes

1 I am thinking of the project to transform society in the image of an imagined “free market” that would finally bring to fruition what nature prescribes (often destroying customary practices and allegiances along the way), or stories of a novus ordo seclorum that will blossom if only we are courageous enough to sweep away the impediments to “freedom” (man’s natural estate)—by aerial bombardment, if necessary. Both enthusiasms tend toward lawlessness. Both seek a world that is easily conjured in the idiom of freedom-talk, but in practice require more thorough submission to mega-bureaucracies, whether of corporations or of an occupation force.

2 In his 2018 book The Revolt of the Public, Martin Gurri diagnoses the eruption of protest movements around the world in 2011—Occupy Wall Street, the indignados in Spain, and the violent street protests in London, to name a few—as a politics of pure negation, driven more by the romance of denunciation than by any positive program. These protests expressed distrust of institutional voices, and a wholesale collapse of social authority. On left and right alike, people feel the system is rigged, and indeed political leaders themselves have stoked this conviction, insisting that elections lost by their side were illegitimate, whether because of “voter suppression” or a phantom epidemic of voting by illegal immigrants. This is dangerous stuff.

3 It is therefore perhaps appropriate to consider Europe’s experiment in transferring political sovereignty to a technocratic, democratically unaccountable governing body (the European Union) for clues as to what sort of political reactions such a project might engender.

4 Richard Rorty celebrated the power of “redescription” to alter our moral outlook. He had in mind the genuinely liberal effect that literature sometimes has in shifting our gaze, for example the effect that reading Dickens or Uncle Tom’s Cabin had in enlarging the sympathies of people in the nineteenth century. But redescriptions can just as easily have an impoverishing effect on how we view ourselves and the world. As Iris Murdoch wrote, man is the animal who makes pictures of himself, and then comes to resemble the pictures.

5 On campus, something like this is evident in the reduction of the entire miasma of teenage sexual incompetence, with its misplaced hopes and callow cruelties, to the legal concept of consent. Under the influence of this reduction, a young person is left with no other vocabulary for articulating her unhappiness and confusion over a sexual encounter. She must not have really consented.

6 In a related materialist vein, Reihan Salam ties “wokeness” to the political economy of precarity. Wokeness is a competitive status game played by aspirants to cultural capital. As one friend put it to me, “my PC status advancement seems to depend on my having a Perry Mason moment, in which I reveal that the defendant’s superficially unobjectionable speech actually hides a subtext of oppression only apparent to me.”

7 Whenever there is a whiff of regulatory concern about possible self-dealing by Google as it expands into services far afield from search, it asserts that if its search results presented anything but the disinterested, best possible match to what “customers” were looking for, they would go elsewhere. This incantation of the free market syllogism works like a magic spell in arresting criticism. But how does the logic of the market apply to a near-monopoly? Or to a firm that provides a free service? The reality, of course, is that the users of Google are not the customers. Customers are those who pay for a product. Advertisers gave Google $95 billion in 2017 for access to the product. The product consists of predictions about users’ susceptibility to a specific pitch.

8 Another difference stands out. The early Progressive program had avowedly nationalist elements (consider William James’s famous essay “The Moral Equivalent of War” promoting a program of universal national service and an ethic of hardness, to be achieved through manual labor). It sought to forge an American identity based on solidarity, whereas for today’s progressives the idea of a common good, defined as American, is more problematic. A version of it underlies the economic populism of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, but the idea of a specifically American common good is also subject to constant challenge on the left, both by immigration maximalists and by intersectional entrepreneurs who must direct their claims against what is common. Relatedly, the perspective of today’s progressivism is global rather than national, and this sits easier with the “shareholder cosmopolitanism” of capital.

9 Woodrow Wilson complained that “the bulk of mankind is rigidly unphilosophical, and nowadays the bulk of mankind votes.” The reformer is bewildered by the need to influence “the mind, not of Americans of the older stocks only, but also of Irishmen, of Germans, of Negroes.” Hamburger argues that it was the expansion of voting rights early in the twentieth century that prompted Wilson to want to shift power from representative bodies to executive agencies.

10 Barbara Tuchman wrote, “Not before or since has so much careful and reasonable thinking been invested in the formation of a government system. . . . [T]he Founders remain a phenomenon to keep in mind to encourage our estimate of human possibilities, even if their example is too rare to be a basis of normal expectations” (The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, 1984).

11 Silicon Valley’s original intellectual affiliations lie deep in the California counterculture: the Human Potential Movement, Esalen, the Whole Earth Catalog, and all that. Like the generation of ’68 in its long march through the institutions, the Valley staked its early identity on an emancipatory mission, and it has had a hard time adjusting its self-image to reflect its sheer power. In the same vein, recall Obama striking the pose of community organizer in his second term, speaking truth to power from Air Force One.

dimanche, 29 mars 2015

In recent months, Facebook has been quietly holding talks with at least half a dozen media companies about hosting their content inside Facebook rather than making users tap a link to go to an external site.

The new proposal by Facebook carries another risk for publishers: the loss of valuable consumer data. When readers click on an article, an array of tracking tools allow the host site to collect valuable information on who they are, how often they visit and what else they have done on the web.

And if Facebook pushes beyond the experimental stage and makes content hosted on the site commonplace, those who do not participate in the program could lose substantial traffic — a factor that has played into the thinking of some publishers. Their articles might load more slowly than their competitors’, and over time readers might avoid those sites.

Last night, I came across an incredibly important article from the New York Times, which described Facebook’s plan to provide direct access to other websites’ content in exchange for some sort of advertising partnership. The implications of this are so huge that at this point I have far more questions than answers.

With 1.4 billion users, the social media site has become a vital source of traffic for publishers looking to reach an increasingly fragmented audience glued to smartphones. In recent months, Facebook has been quietly holding talks with at least half a dozen media companies about hosting their content inside Facebook rather than making users tap a link to go to an external site.

Such a plan would represent a leap of faith for news organizations accustomed to keeping their readers within their own ecosystems, as well as accumulating valuable data on them. Facebook has been trying to allay their fears, according to several of the people briefed on the talks, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were bound by nondisclosure agreements.

Facebook intends to begin testing the new format in the next several months, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions. The initial partners are expected to be The New York Times, BuzzFeed and National Geographic, although others may be added since discussions are continuing. The Times and Facebook are moving closer to a firm deal, one person said.

Facebook has said publicly that it wants to make the experience of consuming content online more seamless. News articles on Facebook are currently linked to the publisher’s own website, and open in a web browser, typically taking about eight seconds to load. Facebook thinks that this is too much time, especially on a mobile device, and that when it comes to catching the roving eyeballs of readers, milliseconds matter.

The Huffington Post and the business and economics website Quartz were also approached. Both also declined to discuss their involvement.

Facebook declined to comment on its specific discussions with publishers. But the company noted that it had provided features to help publishers get better traction on Facebook, including tools unveiled in December that let them target their articles to specific groups of Facebook users, such as young women living in New York who like to travel.

The new proposal by Facebook carries another risk for publishers: the loss of valuable consumer data. When readers click on an article, an array of tracking tools allow the host site to collect valuable information on who they are, how often they visit and what else they have done on the web.

And if Facebook pushes beyond the experimental stage and makes content hosted on the site commonplace, those who do not participate in the program could lose substantial traffic — a factor that has played into the thinking of some publishers. Their articles might load more slowly than their competitors’, and over time readers might avoid those sites.

And just as Facebook has changed its news feed to automatically play videos hosted directly on the site, giving them an advantage compared with videos hosted on YouTube, it could change the feed to give priority to articles hosted directly on its site.

Let me try to address this the best I can from several different angles. First off, what’s the big picture plan here? As the number two ranked website in the world with 1.4 billion users, Facebook itself is already something like an alternative internet where a disturbing number of individuals spend a disproportionate amount of their time. The only thing that seems to make many of its users click away is content hosted on other people’s websites linked to from Facebook users. Other than this outside content, many FB users might never leave the site.

While this is scary to someone like me, to Facebook it is an abomination. The company doesn’t want people to leave their site ever — for any reason. Hence the aggressive push to carry outside news content, and create a better positioned alternative web centrally controlled by it. This is a huge power play move.

Second, the New York Times righty asks the question concerning what will publishers get from Facebook for allowing their content to appear on the site seamlessly. Some sort of revenue share from advertisers seems to be an obvious angle, but perhaps there’s more.

While Facebook isn’t a huge traffic driver for Liberty Blitzkrieg, it isn’t totally irrelevant either. For example, FB provided about 3% of the site’s traffic over the past 12 months. This is despite the fact that LBK doesn’t even have a Facebook page, and I’ve never shared a link through it. Even more impressive, Facebook drove more traffic to LBK over the same time period than Twitter, and I am very active on that platform. So I can only imagine how important FB is to website editors who actually use it.

This brings me to a key point about leverage. It seems to me that Facebook has all the leverage in negotiations with content providers. If you’re a news website that refuses to join in this program, over time you might see your traffic evaporate compared to your competitors whose content will load seamlessly and be promoted by the FB algorithm. If a large percentage of your traffic is being generated by Facebook, can you really afford to lose this?

One thing that FB might be willing to offer publishers in return other than advertising dollars, is increased access to their fan base. For example, when I try to figure out through Google analytics who specifically (or what page) on Facebook is sharing my work, I can’t easily do so. Clearly this information could prove very useful for networking purposes and could be quite valuable. *Note: If there is a way to know which specific Facebook page traffic is originating from please let me know.

Given the enormity of what Facebook is trying to achieve, I have some obvious concerns. First, since all of the leverage seems to reside with Facebook, I fear they are likely to get the better part of any deal by wide margin. Second, if they succeed in this push, this single company’s ability to control access to news and what is trending and deemed important by a huge section of humanity will be extraordinary.

Looking for some additional insight and words of wisdom, I asked the smartest tech/internet person I know for his opinion. It was more optimistic than I thought:

This could be a huge shaper of news on the internet. or it could turn out to be nothing.

Other than saying that I don’t really know how to predict what might or might not happen, and I sort of don’t care much because it is in the realm (for now at least) of stuff that I don’t read (mainstream news), on a site that I never see (Facebook). However, the one thing I wonder in terms of the viability of this is whether in the end it may drive people away from FB.

Back in the day, probably when you weren’t so aware of the nascent net, there were two giant “services” on the Internet called Compuserve and America Online. They were each what you are thinking that Facebook is heading toward; exclusive, centralized portals to the whole net. They were also giant and successful at the time. Then people outside of them started doing things that were so much more creative and interesting. At the same time, in order to make everything fit inside their proprietary boxes and categories, they were making everything ever more standardized and boring. Then they just abruptly died.

“There will come a time when it isn’t ‘They’re spying on me through my phone’ anymore. Eventually, it will be ‘My phone is spying on me.’” ― Philip K. Dick

If ever Americans sell their birthright, it will be for the promise of expediency and comfort delivered by way of blazingly fast Internet, cell phone signals that never drop a call, thermostats that keep us at the perfect temperature without our having to raise a finger, and entertainment that can be simultaneously streamed to our TVs, tablets and cell phones.

Likewise, if ever we find ourselves in bondage, we will have only ourselves to blame for having forged the chains through our own lassitude, laziness and abject reliance on internet-connected gadgets and gizmos that render us wholly irrelevant.

Indeed, while most of us are consumed with our selfies and trying to keep up with what our so-called friends are posting on Facebook, the megacorporation Google has been busily partnering with the National Security Agency (NSA), the Pentagon, and other governmental agencies to develop a new “human” species, so to speak.

We’re fast approaching Philip K. Dick’s vision of the future as depicted in the film Minority Report. There, police agencies apprehend criminals before they can commit a crime, driverless cars populate the highways, and a person’s biometrics are constantly scanned and used to track their movements, target them for advertising, and keep them under perpetual surveillance.

Cue the dawning of the Age of the Internet of Things, in which internet-connected “things” will monitor your home, your health and your habits in order to keep your pantry stocked, your utilities regulated and your life under control and relatively worry-free.

Between driverless cars that completely lacking a steering wheel, accelerator, or brake pedal, and smart pills embedded with computer chips, sensors, cameras and robots, we are poised to outpace the imaginations of science fiction writers such as Philip K. Dick and Isaac Asimov. By the way, there is no such thing as a driverless car. Someone or something will be driving, but it won’t be you.

Nest, Google’s $3 billion acquisition, has been at the forefront of the “connected” industry, with such technologically savvy conveniences as a smart lock that tells your thermostat who is home, what temperatures they like, and when your home is unoccupied; a home phone service system that interacts with your connected devices to “learn when you come and go” and alert you if your kids don’t come home; and a sleep system that will monitor when you fall asleep, when you wake up, and keep the house noises and temperature in a sleep-conducive state.

The aim of these internet-connected devices, as Nest proclaims, is to make “your house a more thoughtful and conscious home.” For example, your car can signal ahead that you’re on your way home, while Hue lights can flash on and off to get your attention if Nest Protect senses something’s wrong. Your coffeemaker, relying on data from fitness and sleep sensors, will brew a stronger pot of coffee for you if you’ve had a restless night.

It’s not just our homes that are being reordered and reimagined in this connected age: it’s our workplaces, our health systems, our government and our very bodies that are being plugged into a matrix over which we have no real control.

Moreover, given the speed and trajectory at which these technologies are developing, it won’t be long before these devices are operating entirely independent of their human creators, which poses a whole new set of worries. As technology expert Nicholas Carr notes, “As soon as you allow robots, or software programs, to act freely in the world, they’re going to run up against ethically fraught situations and face hard choices that can’t be resolved through statistical models. That will be true of self-driving cars, self-flying drones, and battlefield robots, just as it’s already true, on a lesser scale, with automated vacuum cleaners and lawnmowers.”

Unfortunately, in our race to the future, we have failed to consider what such dependence on technology might mean for our humanity, not to mention our freedoms.

Ingestible or implantable chips are a good example of how unprepared we are, morally and otherwise, to navigate this uncharted terrain. Hailed as revolutionary for their ability to access, analyze and manipulate your body from the inside, these smart pills can remind you to take your medication, search for cancer, and even send an alert to your doctor warning of an impending heart attack.

Sure, the technology could save lives, but is that all we need to know? Have we done our due diligence in asking all the questions that need to be asked before unleashing such awesome technology on an unsuspecting populace?

What kind of warnings should users receive about the risks of implanting chip technology inside a body, for instance? How will patients be assured that the technology won’t be used to compel them to take medications they don’t really want to take? Could law enforcement obtain data that would reveal which individuals abuse drugs or sell them on the black market? Could what started as a voluntary experiment be turned into a compulsory government identification program that could erode civil liberties?

Let me put it another way. If you were shocked by Edward Snowden’s revelations about how NSA agents have used surveillance to spy on Americans’ phone calls, emails and text messages, can you imagine what unscrupulous government agents could do with access to your internet-connected car, home and medications? Imagine what a SWAT team could do with the ability to access, monitor and control your internet-connected home—locking you in, turning off the lights, activating alarms, etc.

As for those still reeling from a year of police shootings of unarmed citizens, SWAT team raids, and community uprisings, the menace of government surveillance can’t begin to compare to bullet-riddled bodies, devastated survivors and traumatized children. However, both approaches are just as lethal to our freedoms if left unchecked.

George Orwell understood this. His masterpiece, 1984, portrays a global society of total control in which people are not allowed to have thoughts that in any way disagree with the corporate state. There is no personal freedom, and advanced technology has become the driving force behind a surveillance-driven society. Snitches and cameras are everywhere. And people are subject to the Thought Police, who deal with anyone guilty of thought crimes. The government, or “Party,” is headed by Big Brother, who appears on posters everywhere with the words: “Big Brother is watching you.”

Make no mistake: the Internet of Things is just Big Brother in a more appealing disguise.

Even so, I’m not suggesting we all become Luddites. However, we need to be aware of how quickly a helpful device that makes our lives easier can become a harmful weapon that enslaves us.

This was the underlying lesson of The Matrix, the Wachowski brothers’ futuristic thriller about human beings enslaved by autonomous technological beings that call the shots. As Morpheus, one of the characters in The Matrix, explains:

The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work… when you go to church… when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.

“What truth?” asks Neo.

Morpheus leans in closer to Neo: “That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage. Born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch. A prison for your mind.”

samedi, 29 novembre 2014

Neoliberal Violence in the Age of Orwellian Nightmares

by HENRY A. GIROUX

Ex: http://www.counterpunch.org

The shadow of Orwell’s nightmarish vision of a totalitarian society with its all-embracing reach of surveillance and repression now works its way through American politics like a lethal virus. Orwell’s dystopian apparition of a totalitarian society with its all-embracing reach of surveillance and repression has come to fruition, reshaping the American body politic in the guise of a poorly orchestrated Reality TV show. As Orwell rightly predicted, one of the more significant characteristics of an authoritarian society is its willingness to distort the truth while simultaneously suppressing dissent. But Orwell was only partly right. Today, rather than just agressively instill a sense of fear, dread and isolation, contemporary totalitarian commitment also wins over large number of individuals through appeals to our most debased instincts projected on to hapless others. Our lurid fascination with others’ humiliation and pain is often disguised even to ourselves as entertainment and humor, if perhaps admittedly a little perverse. Under the new authoritarianism fear mixes with the endless production of neoliberal commonsense and a deadening coma-inducing form of celebrity culture. Huxley’s Soma now joins hands with Orwell’s surveillance state.

State terrorism works best when it masks the effects of its power while aggressively producing neoliberal commonsense through diverse cultural apparatuses in order to normalize the values and conditions that legitimate its reign of terror. For instance, Umberto Eco argues that one element of authoritarianism is the rise of an Orwellian version of newspeak, or what he labels as the language of “eternal fascism,” whose purpose is to produce “an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax [whose consequence is] to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.” Dwight Macdonald, writing in the aftermath of World War II and the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust, argues that as more and more people are excluded from the experience of political agency and exhibit “less and less control over the policies” of their governments, ethics is reduced to the status of mere platitudes and politics becomes banal. What has become clear to many Americans is that the electoral system is bankrupt. As the political process becomes more privatized, outsourced, and overrun with money from corporations and billionaires, a wounded republic is on its death bed, gasping for life. In addition, as the state becomes more tightly controlled, organized, and rationalized by the financial elite, politics and morality are deprived of any substance and relevance, thus making it difficult for people to either care about the obligations of critical citizenship or to participate in the broader landscape of politics and power. Far easier to wax ironic or cynical.

For Orwell, the state was organized through traditional forms of authoritarian political power. What Orwell could not have imagined was the reconfiguration of the state under a form of corporate sovereignty in which corporations, the financial elite, and the ultra-rich completely controlled the state and its modes of governance. Hyper-capitalism was no longer merely protected by the state, it has become the state. As is well known, the fossil fuel companies, megabanks, and defense industries such as Boeing, General dynamics Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin now control the major seats of political power and the commanding institutions necessary to insure that the deeply anti-democratic state rule in the interests of the few while exploiting and repressing the many. This was recently made clear by a Princeton University scientific study that analyzed policies passed by the U.S. government from 1981 to 2002 and discovered that vast majority of such policies had nothing to do with the needs and voiced interests of the American people. As the authors pointed out, “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”[1] Put bluntly, the study made clear that the opinions of the public per se simply do not count. The study concluded that rather than being a democracy the United States had become an oligarchy where power is effectively wielded by “the rich, the well connected and the politically powerful, as well as particularly well placed individuals in institutions like banking and finance or the military.”[2]

As a result of this mode of governance, individual and social agency are in crisis and are disappearing in a society in which 99 percent of the public, especially young people and minorities of class and color are considered disposable. At a time when politics is nation-based and power is global, the rulers of the Orwellian state no longer care about the social contract and make no compromises in their ruthless pursuits of power and profits. The social contract, especially in the United States, is on life support as social provisions are cut, pensions are decimated, and the certainty of a once secure job disappears. The new free-floating global elite are unrestrained by the old rules of politics and not only refuse to make any political concessions, they also no longer believe in long-term social investments and are more than willing to condemn those populations now considered disposable to a savage form of casino capitalism.

Isolation, privatization, and the cold logic of a mad version of neoliberal rationality have created new social formations and a social order in which it becomes difficult to form communal bonds, deep connections, a sense of intimacy, and long term commitments. In the manner of Huxley’s cautionary forewarning, people now participate willingly in their own oppression. Neoliberalism has created a society of ruling brutes for whom pain and suffering are now viewed as entertainment, warfare a permanent state of existence, and militarism as the most powerful force shaping masculinity. Politics has taken an exit from ethics and thus the issue of [3]social costs is divorced from any form of intervention in the world. This is the ideological script of political zombies who, as Alain Badiou points out, now control a lifeless version of democracy. Atomization, emotional self-management, and the ideology of self-interests are the curse of both neoliberal societies and democracy itself. Terror now takes the form of the atomization of individual agency and the politics of a moral coma.[4] Poverty, joblessness, low wage work, and the threat of state sanctioned violence produce among many Americans the ongoing fear of a life of perpetual misery and an ongoing struggle simply to survive. Collective paralysis now governs American society, reinforced by a fixed hedonism. Risk taking is individualized through a shameless appeal to resilience.[5] Insecurity coupled with a climate of fear and surveillance dampens dissent and promotes a kind of ethical tranquilization fed daily by the mobilization of endless moral panics, whether they reference immigrants allegedly storming American borders or foreign terrorists blowing up shopping centers. Such conditions more often than not produce withdrawal, insecurity, paranoia, and cynicism rather than rebellion among the American populace.

Americans now live under a form of casino capitalism that revels in deception, kills the radical imagination, depoliticizes the public, and promulgates what might be called an all-embracing punishing state. Idealism and hope for a better future has been replaced by a repressive disciplining machine and a surveillance state that turns every space into a war zone, criminalizes social problems, and legitimates state violence as the most important practice for addressing important social issues. The carceral state and the surveillance state now work together to trump security over freedom and justice while solidifying the rule of the financial elite and the reigning financial services such as banks, investment houses, and hedge funds, all of which profit from the expanding reach of the punishing state. Americans now live in what Robert Jay Lifton once described as a “death-saturated age”[6] as political authority and power have been transformed into a savage form of corporate governance and rule. The United States has moved from a market economy to a market society in which all vestiges of the public good and social contract are viewed with disdain and aggressively eliminated.

The basic elements of casino capitalism and its death wish for democracy are now well known: government should only exists to protect the ruling elite; self-interest is the only organizing principle of agency, risk is privatize; consumption is the only obligation of citizenship; sovereignty is market-driven; deregulation, privatization, and commodification are legitimate elements of the corporate state; market ideology is the template for governing all of social life, exchange values are the only values that matter, and the yardstick of profit is the only viable measure of the good life and advanced society. With the return of the new Gilded Age, not only are democratic values and social protections at risk, but the civic and formative cultures that make such values and protections central to democratic life are being eviscerated. At the heart of neoliberalism in its diverse forms is the common thread of breeding corporate and political monsters, widespread violence, the decimation of political life, and the withdrawal into private

We are witnessing the emergence of new forms of repression that echo the warnings of Aldous Huxley and reach deeply into the individual and collective psyches of the populace. Extending Huxley’s analysis, I want to argue that under regimes of neoliberalism, material violence is matched by symbolic violence through the proliferation of what I call disimagination machines. Borrowing from Georges Didi-Huberman’s use of the term, “disimagination machine,” I extend its meaning to refer to images, along with institutions, discourses, and other modes of representation that undermine the capacity of individuals to bear witness to a different and critical sense of remembering, agency, ethics, and collective resistance.[7] The “disimagination machine” is both a set of cultural apparatuses extending from schools and mainstream media to an idiotic celebrity culture and advertising apparatus that functions primarily to undermine the ability of individuals to think critically, imagine the unimaginable, and engage in thoughtful and critical dialogue. Put simply, to become critically informed citizens of the world.

Neoliberalism’s disimagination machines, extending from schools to print, audio, and screen cultures, are now used to serve the forces of ethical tranquilization as they produce and legitimate endless degrading and humiliating images of the poor, youthful protesters, and others considered disposable. The public pedagogy and market-driven values of neoliberalism constitute a war zone that suppresses any vestige of critical thought while creating the conditions and policies for expanding the boundaries of terminal exclusion. Viewed as unworthy of civic inclusion, immigrants, youth, protesters and others deemed alien or hostile to the mechanizations of privatization, consumption, and commodification are erased from any viable historical and political context. Such groups now fill the landscape of neoliberalism’s dream world. Vast numbers of the American public are now subject to repressive modes of power that criminalize their behavior and relegates them to those public spaces that accelerate their invisibility while exposing them to the harsh machinery of social death.

The neoliberal politics of disposability with its expanding machineries of civic and social death, terminal exclusion, and zones of abandonment constitute a new historical conjuncture and must be addressed within the emergence of a ruthless form of casino capitalism, which is constituted not only as an economic system but also a pedagogical force rewriting the meaning of common sense, agency, desire, and politics itself. The capitalist dream machine is back with huge profits for the ultra-rich, hedge fund managers, and major players in the financial service industries. In these new landscapes of wealth, exclusion, and fraud, the commanding institutions of a savage and fanatical capitalism promote a winner-take-all ethos and aggressively undermine the welfare state while waging a counter revolution against the principles of social citizenship and democracy.

Politics and power are now on the side of lawlessness as is evident in the state’s endless violations of civil liberties, freedom of speech, and the most constitutional rights, mostly done in the name of national security. Lawlessness wraps itself in repressive government policies such as the Patriot Act, the National Defense Authorization Act, Military Commissions, and a host of other legal illegalities. These would include the “right of the president “to order the assassination of any citizen whom he considers allied with terrorists,”[8] use secret evidence to detain individuals indefinitely, develop a massive surveillance panoptican to monitor every communication used by citizens who have not committed a crime, employ state torture against those considered enemy combatants, and block the courts from prosecuting those officials who commit such heinous crimes.[9] The ruling corporate elites have made terror rational and fear the modus operandi of politics.

Power in its most repressive forms is now deployed not only by the police and other forces of repression such as the 17 American intelligence agencies but also through a predatory and commodified culture that turns violence into entertainment, foreign aggression into a video game, and domestic violence into goose-stepping celebration of masculinity and the mad values of militarism. The mediaeval turn to embracing forms of punishment that inflict pain on the psyches and the bodies of young people, poor minorities, and immigrants, in particular, is part of a larger immersion of society in public spectacles of violence. Under the neo-Darwinian ethos of survival of the fittest, the ultimate form of entertainment becomes the pain and humiliation of others, especially those considered disposable and powerless, who are no longer an object of compassion, but of ridicule and amusement. Pleasure loses its emancipatory possibilities and degenerates into a pathology in which misery is celebrated as a source of fun. High octane violence and human suffering are now considered consumer entertainment products designed to raise the collective pleasure quotient. Brute force and savage killing replayed over and over in the culture now function as part of an anti-immune system that turns the economy of genuine pleasure into a mode of sadism that saps democracy of any political substance and moral vitality, even as the body politic appears engaged in a process of cannibalizing its own youth. It gets worse. The visibility of extreme violence in films such as John Wick (2014) and The Equalizer (2014) offer one of the few spaces amid the vacuity of a consumer culture where Americans can feel anything anymore.

Needless to say, extreme violence is more than a spectacle for upping the pleasure quotient of those disengaged from politics; it is also part of a punishing machine that spends more on putting poor minorities in jail than educating them. As American society becomes more militarized and “civil society organizes itself for the production of violence,”[10] the capillaries of militarization feed on and shape social institutions extending from the schools to local police forces. The police, in particular, have been turned into soldiers who view the neighbourhoods in which they operate as war zones. Outfitted with full riot gear, submachine guns, armoured vehicles, and other lethal weapons imported from the battlefields of Iraq and Iran, their mission is to assume battle-ready behaviour. Is it any wonder that violence rather than painstaking neighbourhood police work and community outreach and engagement becomes the norm for dealing with alleged ‘criminals’, especially at a time when more and more behaviours are being criminalised? Is it any wonder that the impact of the rapid militarization of local police forces on poor black communities is nothing short of terrifying and symptomatic of the violence that takes place in advanced genocidal states? For instance, according to a recent report produced by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement entitled Operation Ghetto Storm, “police officers, security guards, or self-appointed vigilantes extra judicially killed at least 313 African-Americans in 2012…This means a black person was killed by a security officer every 28 hours.” The report suggests that ‘the real number could be much higher’.[11] Michelle Alexander adds to the racist nature of the punishing state by pointing out that “There are more African American adults under correctional control today — in prison or jail, on probation or parole — than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.”[12] Meanwhile the real violence used by the state against poor minorities of color, women, immigrants, and low income adults barely gets mentioned, except when it is so spectacularly visible and cruel that it cannot be ignored as in the case of Eric Garner who was choked him to death by a New York City policeman after he was confronted for illegally selling untaxed cigarettes.

The authoritarian state empties politics of all vestiges of democracy given that the decisions that shape all aspects of the commanding institutions of society are now made largely in private, behind closed doors by the anonymous financial elite, corporate CEOs, rich bankers, the unassailable leaders of the military-industrial complex, and other kingpins of the neoliberal state. At the same time, valuable resources and wealth are extracted from the commons in order to maximize the profits of the rich while the public is treated to a range of distractions and diversions that extend from “military shock and awe overseas” to the banalities of a commodified culture industry and celebrity obsessed culture that short-circuits thought and infantilizes everything it touches. In the end, as Chomsky points out this amounts to an attempt by a massive public relations industry and various mainstream cultural apparatuses “to undermine democracy by trying to get uninformed people to make irrational choices.”[13]

Neoliberal authoritarianism has changed the language of politics and everyday life through a poisonous public pedagogy that turns reason on its head and normalizes a culture of fear, war, and exploitation. Even as markets unravel and neoliberalism causes increased misery, “the broader political and social consensus remains in place” suggesting that the economic crisis is not matched by a similar crisis in consciousness, ideas, language, and values.[14] Underlying the rise of the authoritarian state and the forces that hide in the shadows is a hidden politics indebted to promoting crippling forms of historical and social amnesia. The new authoritarianism is strongly indebted to what Orwell once called a “protective stupidity” that corrupts political life and divest language of its critical content.[15]

Yet, even as the claims and promises of a neoliberal utopia have been transformed into a Dickensian nightmare as the United States, and increasingly Canada, succumb to the pathologies of political corruption, the redistribution of wealth upward into the hands of the 1 percent, the rise of the surveillance state, and the use of the criminal justice system as a way of dealing with social problems, Orwell’s dark fantasy of a fascist future continues without massive opposition. Domestic terrorism now functions to punish young people whenever they exercise the right of dissent, protesting peacefully, or just being targeted because they are minorities of class and color and considered a threat and in some cases disposable, as was recently evident in the killing by a white policemen of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

The emergence of the warrior cop and the surveillance state go hand in hand and are indicative not only of state-sanctioned racism but also of the rise of the authoritarian state and the dismantling of civil liberties. Brutality mixed with attacks on freedom of dissent and peaceful protest prompts memories of past savage regimes such as the dictatorships in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s. The events in Ferguson speak to a history of violence in United States that Americans have chosen to forget at their own risk. Historical amnesia takes a toll. For instance, amid the growing intensity of state terrorism, violence becomes the DNA of a society that not only has a history of forgetting, but also refuses to deal with larger structural issues such as massive inequality in wealth and power, a government that now unapologetically serves the rich and powerful corporate interests, the growing militarization of everyday life, while elevating the power of money to an organising principle of governance.[16] What all of this suggests is a dismantling of what Hannah Arendt called “the prime importance of the political.”[17]

Underlying the carnage caused by neoliberal capitalism is a free market ideology in which individuals are cut off from the common good along with any sense of compassion for the other.[18] Economic Darwinism individualizes the social by shredding social bonds that are not commodified and in doing so depoliticizes, atomizes, and infantilizes the broader public. All problems are now defined as a problem of faulty character and a lack of individual resilience and responsibility. At the same time, freedom is reduced to consumerism and a modern day version of narcissism becomes the only guiding principle for living one’s life. Only under such circumstances can a book titled Selfish written by the vacuous Kim Kardashian and filled with 2000 selfies be published and celebrated in the mainstream media, mirroring a deeply disturbing principle of the larger society. What is crucial to recognize is that the central issues of power and politics can lead to cynicism and despair if casino capitalism is not addressed as a system of social relations that diminishes—through its cultural politics, modes of commodification, and market pedagogies—the capacities and possibilities of individuals and groups to move beyond the vicissitudes of necessity and survival in order to fully participate in exercising some control over the myriad forces that shape their daily lives.

What exists in the United States today and increasingly in Canada is fundamentally a new mode of politics, one wedded to a notion of power removed from accountability of any kind, and this poses a dangerous and calamitous threat to democracy itself, because such power is difficult to understand, analyze, and counter. The collapse of the public into the private, the depoliticization of the citizenry in the face of an egregious celebrity culture, and the disabling of education as a critical public sphere makes it easier for neoliberal capital with its hatred of democracy and celebration of the market to render its ideologies, values, and practices as a matter of common sense, removed from critical inquiry and dissent.

With privatization comes a kind of collective amnesia about the potential democratic role of government, the importance of the social contract, and the importance of public values. For instance, war, intelligence operations, prisons, schools, transportation systems, and a range of other operations once considered public have been outsourced or simply handed over to private contractors who are removed from any sense of civic and political accountability. The social contract and the institutions that give it meaning have been transformed into entitlements administered and colonized by largely the corporate interests and the financial elite. Policy is no longer being written by politicians accountable to the American public. Instead, policies concerning the defense budget, deregulation, health care, public transportation, job training programs, and a host of other crucial areas are now largely written by lobbyists who represent mega corporations. How else to explain the weak deregulation policies following the economic crisis of 2007 or the lack of a public option in Obama’s health care policies? Or, for that matter, the more serious retreat from any viable notion of the political imagination that “requires long-term organizing—e.g., single-payer health care, universally free public higher education and public transportation, federal guarantees of housing and income security.”[19] The liberal center has moved to the right on these issues while the left has become largely absent and ineffective. Yet the fight for developing a radical democracy must continue on a domestic and global scale.

Democracy is not compatible with capitalism but is congruent with a version of democratic socialism in which the wealth, resources, and benefits of a social order are shared in an equitable and just manner. Democracy as a promise means that society can never be just enough and that the self-reflection and struggles that enable all members of the community to participate in the decisions and institutions that shape their lives must be continually debated, safeguarded, and preserved at all costs. The rebuilding of a radical democracy must be accompanied with placing a high priority on renewing the social contract, embracing the demands of the commons, encouraging social investments, and the regeneration of the social contract. These are only a few of the issues that should be a central goal for the development of a broad-based radical social movement. I want to emphasize that I am not suggesting that developing a new understanding of politics as a call to reclaim a radical democracy be understood as simply a pragmatic adjustment of the institutions of liberal democracy or a return to the social democracy of the New Deal and Great Society.

On the contrary, any rethinking of the political can only be comprehended as part of a radical break from liberalism and formalistic politics if there is to be any move towards a genuine democracy in which matters of equality, power, and justice are central to what can be called a radical democratic politics. Such a task necessitates a politics and pedagogy that not only expands critical awareness and promotes critical modes of inquiry but also sustains public spheres, builds new modes of solidarity and connections and promotes strategies and organizations that create not simply ruptures such as massive demonstrations but real changes that are systemic and long standing. If such a politics is to make any difference, it must be worldly; that is, it must incorporate a critical public pedagogy and an understanding of cultural politics that not only contemplates social problems but also addresses the conditions for new forms of democratic political exchange and enables new forms of agency, power, and collective struggle. The collapse of the United States into neoliberal authoritarianism signals not simply a crisis of politics and democracy, but a crisis of ideas, values, and agency itself. Hence, calling for a revival of the educative nature of politics and the radical imagination is more than a simply call to find ways to change consciousness; it is first and foremost an attempt to understand that education is at the center of a struggle over what kinds of agency will be created in the interest of legitimating the present and producing a particular kind of future. This is an imminently educative, moral, and political task and it is only through such recognition that initial steps can be taken to challenge the powerful ideological and affective spaces through which neoliberalism produces the desires, identities, and values that bind people to its forms of predatory governance.

The moral, political, and economic violence of neoliberalism must be made visible, its institutional structures dismantled, and the elite interests it serves exposed. The fog of historical, social and political amnesia must be eliminated through the development of educational programs, pedagogical practices, ideological interventions, and public narratives that provide the critical and analytical tools to enable the public to analyze both underlying ideologies and institutions of neoliberal capitalism as well as the intellectual and economic resources needed to provide meaningful alternatives to the corporate authoritarianism that passes itself off as an updated mode of democracy. What is important here is that the struggle against neoliberalism focus on those forms of domination that pose a threat to those public spheres essential to developing the critical formative cultures that nourish modes of thinking, analysis, and social formations necessary for a radical democracy.

In addition, the left has to do more than chart out the mechanisms through which neoliberal authoritarianism sustains itself. And for too many on the left this means simply understanding the economic forces that drive neoliberal global capitalism. While this structural logic is important, it does not go far enough. As Stuart Hall has insisted “There’s no politics without identification. People have to invest something of themselves, something that they recognize is meaningful to them, or speaks to their condition and without that moment of recognition” any effort to change the way people inhabit social relations of domination will fail.[20] Pierre Bourdieu takes this logic further in arguing that left has often failed to recognize “that the most important forms of domination are not only economic but also intellectual and pedagogical, and lie on the side of belief and persuasion”[21] He insists, rightly, that it is crucial for the left and other progressives to recognize that intellectuals bear an enormous responsibility for challenging this form of domination by developing tactics “that lie on the side of the symbolic and pedagogical dimensions of struggle.”[22]

If neoliberal authoritarianism is to be challenged and overcome, it is crucial that intellectuals, unions, workers, young people, and various social movements unite to reclaim democracy as a central element in fashioning a radical imagination that foregrounds the necessity for drastically altering the material and symbolic forces that hide behind a counterfeit claim to participatory democracy. This means imagining a radical democracy that can provide a living wage, decent health care, public works, and massive investments in education, child care, housing for the poor, along with a range of other crucial social provisions that can make a difference between living and dying for those who have been cast into the ranks of the disposable.

There are new signs indicating that the search for a new understanding of politics and the refashioning of a radical imagination are emerging, especially in Greece, Germany, Spain, and Denmark, where expressions of new political formations can be found in political groups such as Podemos, Die Linke, Syriza, and the Red-Green Alliance. While these political formations have differences, what they share is a rejection of stale reformism that has marked liberal politics for the last 40 years. These new political formations are offering alternatives to a new kind of social order in which capitalism does not equal democracy. But more importantly, they are not tied merely to unions and older political factions and are uniting with social movements under a broad and comprehensive vision of politics and change that goes beyond identity politics and organizes for the long haul. Moreover, as Juan Pablo Ferrero points out, these parties not only take seriously the need for economic change but also the need for new cultural formations and modes of change.[23] The struggle against neoliberal common sense is as important as the struggle against those institutions and material modes of capital that are the foundation of traditional politics of resistance. Language, communication, and pedagogy are crucial to these movements as part of their attempt to construct a new kind of informed and critical political agent, one freed from the orbits of neoliberal privatization and the all-embracing reach of a commodified and militarized society.

What Podemos, Syriza, and other new political movements on the left make clear is that the fight against neoliberalism and the related anti-democratic tendencies that inform it must not settle for simply reforming the existing parameters of the social order. Neoliberalism has created an economic, cultural, and social system and social order that is not only as broken as it is dangerous, but also pathological in the violence and misery it produces. Any viable struggle must acknowledge that if the current modes of domination are to change, a newly developed emphasis must be placed on creating the formative culture that inspires and energizes young people, educators, artists, and others to organize and struggle for the promise of a substantive democracy.

At the same time, particular injustices must be understood through the specificity of the conditions in which they develop and take hold and also in relation to the whole of the social order. This means developing modes of analyses capable of connecting isolated and individualized issues to more generalized notions of freedom, and developing theoretical frameworks in which it becomes possible to translate private troubles into broader more systemic conditions. At the very least, a new political imaginary suggests developing modes of analyses that connects the dots. This is a particularly important goal given that the fragmentation of the left has been partly responsible for its inability to develop a wide political and ideological umbrella to address a range of problems extending from extreme poverty, the assault on the environment, the emergence of the permanent warfare state, the abolition of voting rights, the assault on public servants, women’s rights, and social provisions, and a range of other issues that erode the possibilities for a radical democracy. Neoliberalism stands for the death of democracy and the commodification and repression of any movement that is going to successfully challenge it.

One of the most serious challenges facing progressives is the task of developing a discourse of both critique and possibility. This means insisting that democracy begins to fail and political life becomes impoverished in the absence of those vital public spheres such as higher education in which civic values, public scholarship, and social engagement allow for a more imaginative grasp of a future that takes seriously the demands of justice, equity, and civic courage. Such a challenge demands not only confronting symptoms as a way of decreasing the misery and human suffering that people experience on a daily basis, but most importantly addressing the root causes that produce the despotism and culture of cruelty that marks the current period. The time has come to develop a political language in which civic values, social responsibility, and the institutions that support them become central to invigorating and fortifying a new era of civic imagination, and a renewed sense of social agency. A revitalized politics for imagining a radical democracy must promote an impassioned international social movement with a vision, organization, and set of strategies to challenge the neoliberal nightmare engulfing the planet. The dystopian worlds of Orwell and Huxley are sutured in fear, atomization, and a paralyzing anxiety. Unfortunately, these dystopian visions are no longer works of fiction. The task ahead is to relegate them to the realm of dystopian fiction so they can remind us that a radical democracy is not simply a political project, but a way of life that has to be struggled over endlessly.

[6] Robert Jay Lifton, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), p. 479. See Lynn Worsham’s brilliant use of Lifton’s work in her “Thinking with Cats (More to Follow),” JAC 30:3-4 (2010), pp. 405-433.

[9] For a clear expose of the emerging surveillance state, see Glenn Greenwald, No Place to Hide (New York: Signal, 2014); Julia Angwin, Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance (New York: Times Books, 2014); Heidi Boghosian, Spying on Democracy: Government Surveillance, Corporate Power, and Public Resistance, (City Lights Books, 2013).

[10] Catherine Lutz, “Making War at Home in the United States: Militarization and the Current Crisis,” American Anthropologist, (104:3, 2002), pp. (723)

[11] Adam Hudson, “1 Black Man Is Killed Every 28 Hours by Police or Vigilantes: America Is Perpetually at War with Its Own People,” AlterNet (March 28, 2013). Online: http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/1-black-man-killed-every-28-hours-police-or-vigilantes-america-perpetually-war-its; see also the report titled Operation Ghetto Storm. Online: http://mxgm.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Operation-Ghetto-Storm.pdf

What is most striking about the American police state is not the mega-corporations running amok in the halls of Congress, the militarized police crashing through doors and shooting unarmed citizens, or the invasive surveillance regime which has come to dominate every aspect of our lives. No, what has been most disconcerting about the emergence of the American police state is the extent to which the citizenry appears content to passively wait for someone else to solve our nation’s many problems. Unless Americans are prepared to engage in militant nonviolent resistance in the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi, true reform, if any, will be a long time coming.

Yet as I detail in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, if we don’t act soon, all that is in need of fixing will soon be unfixable, especially as it relates to the police state that becomes more entrenched with each passing day. By “police state,” I am referring to more than a society overrun by the long arm of the police. I am referring to a society in which all aspects of a person’s life are policed by government agents, one in which all citizens are suspects, their activities monitored and regulated, their movements tracked, their communications spied upon, and their lives, liberties and pursuit of happiness dependent on the government’s say-so.

As the following will show, the electronic concentration camp, as I have dubbed the surveillance state, is perhaps the most insidious of the police state’s many tentacles, impacting almost every aspect of our lives and making it that much easier for the government to encroach on our most vital freedoms.

Tracking you based on your consumer activities: Fusion centers, federal-state law enforcement partnerships which attempt to aggregate a variety of data on so-called “suspicious persons,” have actually collected reports on people buying pallets of bottled water, photographing government buildings, and applying for a pilot’s license as “suspicious activity.” Retailers are getting in on the surveillance game as well. Large corporations such as Target have been tracking and assessing the behavior of their customers, particularly their purchasing patterns, for years. In 2015, mega-food corporations will be rolling out high-tech shelving outfitted with cameras in order to track the shopping behavior of customers, as well as information like the age and sex of shoppers.

Tracking you based on your public activities: Sensing a booming industry, private corporations are jumping on the surveillance state bandwagon, negotiating lucrative contracts with police agencies throughout the country in order to create a web of surveillance that encompasses all major urban centers. Companies such as NICE and Bright Planet are selling equipment and services to police departments with the promise of monitoring large groups of people seamlessly, as in the case of protests and rallies. They are also engaging in extensive online surveillance, looking for any hints of “large public events, social unrest, gang communications, and criminally predicated individuals.”

Tracking you based on your behavior: Thanks to a torrent of federal grants, police departments across the country are able to fund outrageous new surveillance systems that turn the most basic human behaviors into suspicious situations to be studied and analyzed. Police in California, Massachusetts, and New York have all received federal funds to create systems like that operated by the New York Police Department, which “links 3,000 surveillance cameras with license plate readers, radiation sensors, criminal databases and terror suspect lists.”

Tracking you based on your face: Facial recognition software promises to create a society in which every individual who steps out into public is tracked and recorded as they go about their daily business. The goal is for government agents to be able to scan a crowd of people and instantaneously identify all of the individuals present. Facial recognition programs are being rolled out in states all across the country (only twelve states do not use facial recognition software).

Tracking you based on your social media activities: The obsession with social media as a form of surveillance will have some frightening consequences in coming years. As Helen A.S. Popkin, writing for NBC News, has astutely observed, “We may very well face a future where algorithms bust people en masse for referencing illegal ‘Game of Thrones’ downloads, or run sweeps for insurance companies seeking non-smokers confessing to lapsing back into the habit. Instead of that one guy getting busted for a lame joke misinterpreted as a real threat, the new software has the potential to roll, Terminator-style, targeting every social media user with a shameful confession or questionable sense of humor.”

Tracking you based on your metadata: Metadata is an incredibly invasive set of data to have on a person. Indeed, with access to one’s metadata, one can “identify people’s friends and associates, detect where they were at a certain time, acquire clues to religious or political affiliations, and pick up sensitive information like regular calls to a psychiatrist’s office, late-night messages to an extramarital partner or exchanges with a fellow plotter.” The National Security Agency (NSA) has been particularly interested in metadata, compiling information on Americans’ social connections “that can identify their associates, their locations at certain times, their traveling companions and other personal information.”

To put it bluntly, we are living in an electronic concentration camp. Through a series of imperceptible steps, we have willingly allowed ourselves to become enmeshed in a system that knows the most intimate details of our lives, analyzes them, and treats us accordingly. As George Orwell warned, “You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”

Thus, we have arrived in Orwell’s world. The question now is: will we take a stand and fight to remain free or will we go gently into the concentration camp?